In a known manner, an aircraft cockpit has a large number of piloting and display members allowing an aircraft crew to pilot the aircraft and to monitor the operation of part of the onboard avionic and auxiliary systems.
The growing complexity of these avionic systems as well as the multiple piloting tasks performed by the crew to pilot the aircraft require the presentation of many pieces of information in the cockpit.
This information in particular comprises the current situation of the aircraft relative to the air mass, the orientation and the position of the aircraft relative to a land coordinate system, the desired trajectory of the aircraft, the predictions on the situation of the aircraft at the various waypoints of a flight plan, the flight conditions in the environment of the aircraft and its anticipated flight plan, the technical status of the various onboard avionic systems, etc.
This information is presented in current cockpits in several display spaces, which in particular include the display space referred to as the PFD (Primary Flight Display) or the display space known as the ND (Navigation Display). Other devices typically make it possible to provide status information for the auxiliary systems as well as, in case of failure, the procedures to be carried out by the crew or automatically to address the failures.
One particular type of information displayed in the cockpit relates to messages intended for the crew and generally presented in the form of text, messages received by the display devices from other avionic functions.
These messages in particular comprise failure messages for one or several avionic or auxiliary systems, messages from an air traffic control (ATC) center or messages from an AOC (airline operations center).
The crew is responsible for processing these messages, and must indicate that it has received a message (acknowledgment), read each received message, evaluate its contents, indicate that it will cooperate with the request made by the message or is unable to do so, and carry out one or several requests contained in this message in particular when it involves a message from air traffic control.
Conventionally, the display of such messages is limited to a partial interface leaving each pilot responsible for manually inserting this data into a flight management computer, for example.
One can then see that the processing of these messages systematically requires a cumbersome intervention by the crew regarding workload.